“Oh do shut the fuck up about your ideas on faith and destiny,” Philip said, cutting Deon off.
“Let him speak, Philip. He’s just as involved in this as you are,” said Rei. “But probably not the praying part, Deon.” She smiled at him and he smiled back. “What were you saying about trust?”
“Well that’s it really. We’re all here, we don’t know why exactly anything happens, but we have to accept it to an extent and try to see the end that is right. And getting Mathew out of the Walden Centre doesn’t mean that he can’t meet up with his daughter. We need to get him out the country, but we can do that and take in Devon in the route. That shouldn’t be a problem.”
“It is a good compromise, Philip.” Rei spoke softly to him. “I’m sure in a day or two allowing Mathew to visit his daughter would be possible. I don’t think that the clinic would trace him there…and it would add something to your story. Imagine the impact that a feature on a generation reunited could have.”
“Hmm, maybe.”
“I haven’t agreed to this yet, you know. It is my life you’re playing with.”
“Well, if you have a better idea pal, now would be a good time. I still think it’s dangerous keeping him in the country longer than necessary, but maybe that would be the best way to arrange things. Where is the daughter?”
“I’ve traced her to a place called Beer,” explained Deon, still sorting out his bag and eventually pulling his autopipe out and activating a tablet in one of the compartments.
“Is it definitely Jess?”
“Almost certainly. But we’re not really able to communicate with her except in person.”
“Well that’s what I want to do then.”
No one spoke for a while. Rei was the first one to break the silence and spoke as she wafted away the smell from Deon’s pipe. “Deon, we should arrange transport south. You still think you can do that?” He nodded. “And we should all go. I have a duty still to Mathew and Deon, you have skills that will be needed. Philip? You will be of great use if you come.”
“I need to follow this story to its end. Anyway, no one in London’s going to miss me.”
“You can collect anything that you need, but we should not tell anyone else where we are going. Agreed?”
Deon looked up at her, and she thought he seemed slightly sad as he said, “I don’t have anyone to tell anyway.”
“Nor me,” added Philip. “No one who’d be interested anyhow. Just my editor.”
“I have to make some arrangements tonight, and then I’ll need to go in person to meet the travellers,” Deon said, collecting the bag he had brought with him and packing items from his pockets into it.
“Who?” asked Mathew.
“I can get us ride with some Roamers who have a camp not far from here. “I’ve travelled with them before. I just need to find out when they’re leaving and work out the payments that they want to move us. It should all only take about an hour.”
“Roamers?”
“Travelling people,” explained Philip.
“Gypsies?” Mathew was a little suspicious.
“They’re Roamers, travellers, they’re not really like you’re twentieth century gypsies,” explained Philip. “Although I suppose some are descended from them,” he added.
“I’ll come with you.” Rei was still not totally sure how much she trusted Deon, and preferred to keep him close by. She wasn’t expecting any major trouble from him, but he certainly seemed to have a talent for attracting trouble. “But we should get some rest now and go tomorrow evening when the business at the clinic has subsided.”
“And do we have anything here?” asked Mathew. “Like food and water? And is there any heating? I’m freezing.”
“I’ve had some food and blankets sent here for us.” Philip shouted over his shoulder as he started to unpack a small box in the corner of the room. “A lot’s happened today, and I think we all need some sleep. Deon, you and Rei can go see your friends tomorrow evening, then arrange to get us all away as quick as they can, ok? In the meantime, we’ll just have to make ourselves as comfortable as we can. It may be a little boring, but the next 24 hours may be the last rest we all get for a while.”
37
After an uncomfortable night they’d spent a dull day locked in the attic room. Philip and Rei had discussed plans and scenarios on where to go when they left Britain, although until they were across the Channel neither of them wanted to commit to anything. Philip also periodically made notes into the voice recorder on his c-pac, while Deon tried to teach Mathew some new skills on his, in particular how to use the interactive gaming facility on the ethervision. It was a long and dull day and Mathew was glad when the light had started to fade and Deon and Rei left for the Roamers’ encampment. If everything went to plan they would be able to leave the following day.
The door shut behind Deon and Rei, leaving Philip and Mathew in the subdued light of the cold room. Philip paced nervously around the two fenestrated sides of the room, looking out of each window at any passers-by in the street. Mathew sat in the centre of the room on an upturned box. He still had the c-pac that Deon had lent him and it was now set it to play patience, one of the few tricks he’d learnt to do with the machine over the course of the day. He sat quietly flicking the electronically displayed cards over in front of him, then wiping the deck and starting again, hardly looking at his anxious companion. He was still fascinated by the way that he could touch and interact with the projected images, although he had a problem comprehending that he could not feel the cards that his hand moved. Philip left the window and moved across to the far side of the room, producing a bottle from the bag that he’d brought with him.
“That queen there can go on the pile to your left,” Philip said.
“I don’t need your help,” replied Mathew.
“You know if you use the integrated system you don’t have to have to have the cards visible to everyone on the ethervision, then it won’t annoy anyone passing, who won’t have to tell you how to play the fucking game.”
“Or you could just ignore it!”
“Fuck this,” Philip said. “I’m having a drink. Want one?”
“No thanks,” replied Mathew curtly, not looking up from the cards that floated unsupported in the air in front of him, and selecting a ‘7’ from it.
“Don’t approve?”
“It’s nothing to do with me what you do, Philip. I’d just rather have a clear head.”
“Suit yourself.” Philip poured a measure of scotch into a metal beaker and downed the contents swiftly before refilling the cup.
“Are you going to get pissed?”
“Huh?”
“Are you getting drunk?” repeated Mathew, saying the words slowly and deliberately, as if he was talking to a non-too-bright twelve-year-old.
“I’m nervous. I’ve put my fucking neck out here. I have no contingency plan, and we seem to have no real strategy to work with at all. We have to rely on some over-zealous religious crank who we know very little about, and we’re about to make some kind of trade-off with the travellers in order to get us somewhere which isn’t where we need to go. I’ve helped spring a patient from an unethical medical facility, run by a devious prick, who wants him dead, and I’ve set off a couple of minor explosives in the centre of London. So yes, I’m going to have a drink and think things through. It’s how I work. And no, I’m not getting ‘pissed’. Is that ok with you?”
“Like I said, it’s nothing to do with me. It’s just I’ve seen people before who drank ’cos they couldn’t cope with reality and I’m not comfortable with it to be honest.”
“I’m sorry?! You’re not comfortable? Well, Mr Reality, perhaps you should waken up a bit.” Philip had been biting his lip, but the tension brought his anger to the surface. “Coming from a man who’s so in touch with reality that he can’t even accept that he’s not fucking immortal I find that a bit offensive. So you can just lighten up and shut up, ’cos I really don’t give
a rat’s what you think about me at the moment. You want to remember who’s helping who here. Got it?”
Mathew said nothing, but went back to his card game. Philip glared at him for a few seconds, but got no response. He downed another mouthful of the warm liquid, thought about topping up the beaker and decided against it before he went back to his watch of the windows. The street was fairly quiet and the rooftops were silhouetted through the rain in the twilight of the day as ethervision adverts started to flicker to life in front of the offices.
After a few minutes of seeing nothing Philip started to grow bored and wondered back to the centre of the room. He checked the time and gave an exaggerated sigh.
“They’re only supposed to be an hour.”
“How long has it been?” asked Mathew, not looking up.
“Just on an hour and a quarter.”
“Is it still raining?”
“Fuck this. I can’t just sit here and talk about the sodding weather.”
“What exactly is your problem?” Mathew cleared the cards as he spoke and looked directly at Philip for the first time since the others had left. The cards fluttered in mid air before disappearing. He didn’t like coming over aggressively, and was worried about aggravating the twinge in his chest that he’d felt since waking up here, but Brading had been winding him up all day and he was really ready to have it out with the man, however bad he felt.
“You! You’re my fucking problem.” Philip marched up to Mathew and stood over him as he spoke, his face slightly reddened and the veins on his temples throbbed. “Because of you and some fucking mental idea about immortality that you had last century, I’m left standing in a deserted warehouse in south east London on a wet evening, when I could be at home working on a story that would actually pay some bills. But no, I’m babysitting you with a vague idea about possibly writing something that no one will care about in a week’s time. I’m a journo and you, my friend, are short-term news, and do you know why? ’Cos there’s no human interest in this story. It’s about your stupid ego. How important did you think you were, that you’d be of some use to the world in the future?”
“I never wanted to be of any use, I wanted to live a full life. I don’t want to be immortal, but I never wanted to wanted to die in my thirties either. Do you? I was ill you know, or had you forgotten that. I’m 38; I have a wife and kid. Or at least I did, and just maybe I still do somewhere. I was told that I was never going to see my daughter grow up. Never see her married. No more birthdays, Christmases, nothing. Leave my wife and family and everything that I loved. And I found a way to change that. I’m a family man, I’m not a solo agent like you. I don’t really expect you to understand that but do you really think that makes me an egotist?” Mathew realised that tears were welling in his eyes and fought to hide his face from the bulky journalist.
“I think it makes you naïve at best. Look, I don’t want to just have a go for the sake of it. But this hasn’t turned out to be the best thing you could do for yourself…or your family.”
“You wouldn’t understand. You think you’re pretty clever and successful. But what do you do? Pour that shit down your throat every time you have a problem. And where are your friends, your family. You don’t have any ’cos no one gives a fuck about you or your opinions. You criticise things that you know sod all about and hurt people for the sake of it. You’d have been an excellent journalist in the twentieth century, you know, they were all full of shite too.”
Mathew waited for the return, but instead a grin came over Philip’s face.
“What the hell does ‘shite’ mean?” he asked condescendingly. Mathew lightened up and grinned slightly for the first time in a while.
“It’s a turn of phrase I suppose. I guess nobody uses that anymore. Can we just try and get along and make the best of this situation?” Phil nodded, still smiling to himself.
“Yeah, OK. Let’s just try not shite on each other, eh?”
Mathew laughed. “It doesn’t really sound right like that. But I’m sure we can manage to talk civilly for the time this is going to take. And maybe there is a story here. I could be your big break. I remember the press coverage when the first heart transplant took place…” Phil held out a hand to stop Mathew.
“You crack me up you know. ‘Shite’, the first transplant, you’ll start on about the Poll Tax next. Perhaps we should put you on the screen as a kind of out of time comic.
“But seriously, did you really think you going to wake up in some future utopia and everything would be great and they’d be pleased to have you?”
“Well, yes,” said Mathew, slightly embarrassed. “That is pretty much it. I never saw myself as a news story, or going on the run from some fucked-up clinic. All the films we watched as kids showed the future as a glittering place where anything was possible.”
“Really? And you bought all that?”
“Well, no, yes, sort of. I always assumed the future would be better than the present. I thought that there was always progress.”
“You know in the Middle Ages they thought the perfect world was the Garden of Eden, and everything after that was decaying until the world ended. The idea of progress creating a better world is a fairly modern notion.”
“Well, this isn’t the future that I was expecting to wake up in.”
“So what did you think you’d do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Work, employment, how you’d support yourself, that sort of stuff.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t really think that far ahead. But I felt cheated. I’m only 38. I’ve a beautiful wife and baby girl. I wasn’t ready to die. I just wanted Paula and myself to be able to start again with a clean slate. You know some people live for years, decades, with people that they hate. We’re in love. We are a really close family and I’m going to do anything that I can to stop that being torn apart.”
“But you don’t know where she is.”
“Who? Paula or Jessica?”
“Well, either. You’ve got nothing to go on yet. You don’t know that Paula is in cryopreservation.”
“Why wouldn’t she be? It was arranged, I can still find her.”
“Fine. So let’s say that you find her and get someone to bring her back. What then? What about your girl.”
“Well, I’m not thinking that far ahead yet. Deon reckons that he’s got a lead and that’s good enough for me for the moment.” Mathew paused for a moment and looked at the strange place, in the strange world, that he’d landed in. “I was cheated,” he continued. “I’m a young man. I mean ok, I’m no teenager, but I should have had years ahead of me. Decades. I hadn’t had time to do anything constructive with my life. Some people lead terrible lives and live for years longer than I have. It isn’t fair. I’ve never made my mark on the world….” Philip held up a hand to stop him again.
“Life isn’t fair pal. Karma doesn’t hunt down every bad person. Justice is arbitrary. Just because you died, er, sorry, I mean…well, you know what I mean. Anyway, just because you were in your thirties doesn’t mean you hadn’t had time to achieve anything. Alexander the Great died at 33, and by that time he’d conquered virtually the entire known world. Look at all the great people who died young and still left legacies behind them. Maybe you’re just one of those many billions of people destined not to make a mark on the world in that way. Look at what you did leave behind. Your family was your legacy, but the people of your time all seemed to be so obsessed with fame and longevity that you couldn’t just accept the ephemeral nature of life. It’s like that quote from John Lennon about everyone being famous for a day.”
“It was Andy Warhol and the time was fifteen minutes.”
“Whatever. But the fact that you even knew that just shows how captivated by celebrity you people were. Most of us never really make our stamp in history like that. We carry on and do what we can, but we can’t all expect to be celebrated in our own lifetimes; let alone in other eras. You had a disease that couldn’t be cur
ed in your time. It’s sad, but it happens. We still can’t cure everything. People still die, they’re still poor, and they’re still downtrodden. There are still famines and disasters. Do you want everyone to achieve lasting success and longevity? And what about the next time?”
“How do mean?” Mathew pulled a blanket from a pile and wrapped himself in it, shivering.
“Ok. You’ve been cured and reanimated, yeah. But not forever. Here you are in the second half of the twenty-first century, and what happens when you get ill now? What about if you get a major brain tumour, or a cancer that’s not caught in time? What about dementia? You can still get old and deteriorate you know. And what about the fact that the world’s so grossly overpopulated? Christ, if we all lived on into the next century there wouldn’t be enough food. We’ve already stretched out aquacultural resources to their limit. For fuck’s sake there probably wouldn’t be enough oxygen.”
“So you think I’m being selfish?”
“I think that you’re hopelessly misguided in your beliefs. I mean, is this the future that you expected?”
“I don’t know. I sort of expected everything to be glass and steel, and automated. Maybe I’ve seen too many sci-fi films. Perhaps I thought all the cars would fly and we’d all wear silver suits.” Mathew smiled at the idea and looked out at street full of motorbikes and dirt.
“Depends where you are. It’s certainly not like that in Europe since the Depression.”
“What depression.”
“It’s so weird, of course you don’t know any twenty-first century history do you?” Mathew looked blankly back. To be truthful, he thought, he didn’t actually know much twentieth century history either, but he kept quiet.
“When you were alive, I mean before, what were the important areas and nations? Europe, America and the Soviet Union?”
“Well Russia sort of went downhill in the late 1980s, but yeah, I guess that’s about right,” Mathew said, wondering where this was going.
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